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Objective

This FET-open Coordination and Support Action is called “Nanoarchitectronics” (NTX) to denote a new interdisciplinary research area at the crossroad of Electromagnetics and Nanoelectronics. NTX It is a new technology aimed at conceiving, designing and developing reconfigurable, adaptive and cognitive structures, sensorial surfaces and functional “skins” with unique physical properties, and engineering applications in the whole electromagnetic spectrum; through assembling building blocks at nanoscale in hierarchical architectures. The conception of this new area responds to the need of unifying concepts, methodologies and technologies in Communications, Environment Sensing Systems, Safety and Security, Bio-Sensing Systems and Imaging Nanosystems, within a wide frequency range. This FET project proposal gathers thirteen universities, research centers and high-tech industries, belonging to eight European countries. According to the FET work-program, the major objective of “Nanoarchitectronics” is to boost the future application-driven research through the establishment of an accepted language among physicists and engineers, a shared way of thinking, a common theoretical foundation and a common strategy for the future. Therefore, the project aims at laying the foundation for an ever-increasing synergy and progress of Nanoarchitectronics. To achieve these objectives, Nanoarchitectronics is structured in four main activities. The “Concept” activity is devoted to establish and define the concepts of Nanoarchitectronics and its boundaries with respect to other disciplines and to the activity carried out by other consortia. The “Strategy” activity identifies the policy dialogue and the strategic view of the consortium in terms of position, impact and vision. The “Virtual Networking” serves to internal web communication (private), and for dissemination (public). The “Dissemination and Exploitation” activity is carried out mainly by the industrial partners of the consortium

Integration of multiple disciplines and varied fields of expertise has historically spurred tremendous growth and advances that would not be otherwise possible. The NANOARCHITECTRONICS project is at the forefront of the next great fusion.
The convergence of nanotechnology, hierarchical architectures, and electronics promises to spark development of ground-breaking sensorial surfaces and smart ‘skins’ with unprecedented capabilities. NANOARCHITECTRONICS brought together 13 partners from 8 European countries to define a common language, theoretical foundation, and research roadmap. In addition to unifying concepts and strategy, the consortium got the ball rolling with numerous collaborative and dissemination activities.
The vision for sensing
NANOARCHITECTRONICS facilitates convergence of conventional principles of electromagnetic systems with hierarchical architectures at the nanoscale. The result will be pioneering reconfigurable and adaptive systems responsive across the entire electromagnetic frequency spectrum.
Project researchers envision the field as pioneering the development of synthetic sensing systems that interact with us naturally. As project coordinator Stefano Maci explains, “The new field aims for sensorial interfaces between a subject (person or system) and the environment. They will look like synthetic, mutable skins. These interfaces will cognitively evolve their functionalities to maximise connections and monitoring/sensing capabilities.”
Defining the present, guiding the future
Conceived to provide a standard language, NANOARCHITECTRONICS will define clear boundaries for current research and a roadmap for the future. In an emerging discipline born of the convergence of numerous cutting-edge technologies including nanophotonics, plasmonics, nanoelectronics, and smart materials, this was no simple task.
The consortium developed a framework based on three newly christened research areas, each an intersection of numerous other fields. Nanoscale materials engineering and multiscale design enabling modelling unite these areas.
Using these defined areas of research, the team developed the strategic roadmap, bridging the gap between theoretical research and research driven by societal challenges and industrial competitiveness. It includes a timeline and recommendations for research to achieve ‘omni-connectivity,’ consolidating European leadership in key areas and strengthening it in emerging ones.
All the hard work and detailed outcomes have been exploited in numerous ways with outstanding results.
NANOARCHITECTRONICS established the NTX Virtual Centre to help partners disseminate the NANOARCHITECTRONICS paradigm within the research/industrial communities and enhance their research potential. The Joint Common Repository contains data, results, models, and tools for researchers working on nanoarchitectronics projects.
International cooperation was the focus of three activities geared toward the research community, local government, and public-private partnerships. Organisation and/or participation in a wealth of international events such as workshops and special conference sessions included three specialised PhD courses.
The NANOARCHITECTRONICS project did more than produce unifying concepts – it unified a multitude of organisations working on the cutting edge of this emerging technology. As Maci concludes, NANOARCHITECTRONICS succeeded in “the constitution of a broad community, presently counting 50 partners, and the definition of a flagship vision for the new key enabling technology of nanostructured interfaces in the larger context of nanoengineering.”
Specifically, the academic-industrial partnership of the FORESEEN network, the originator of the concept of nanoarchitectronics and the present project, expanded from its original 33 partners to 50. This group, along with 72 other institutions in the spintronics, metamaterials, and nanophotonics communities have subscribed to a flagship vision for nanostructured interfaces. With NANOARCHITECTRONICS, the ship has set sail.

This FET-CSA project, entitled “Nanoarchitectronics” (NTX) proposal gathers thirteen universities, research centers and high-tech industries, belonging to eight European countries. The name Nanoarchitectronics comes from the merger of three key terms: “nano”, “architecture” and “electronics”. It is a new technology, based on nanoscale building block, for conceiving, designing and developing reconfigurable, adaptive and cognitive functional system interfaces for ICT applications. This is a new interdisciplinary scientific area that addresses the research and applications in the huge frequency spectrum at the crossroad of Electromagnetics, Metamaterial, Electronics, and Photonics through the use of Nanotechnology and Wave-Matter interaction. The relevance for the society is due to the fact that the European society’s grand challenge in ICT, brings today to a large variety of platforms, systems and functionalities. Trying to address this broad variety of entities in a unitary frame implies operation and communications in an extremely broad range of frequencies with high level of functionalities and component integration. This requires an unprecedented level of technological convergence into a revolutionary framework, which has the final vision to unify the interaction between humans or systems with the surrounding environment by means of adaptive, cognitive, sensorial and scalable “system interfaces” connected with the environment. NTX is the game-changer enabling technology envisaged to develop such new kind of systems and components.The major objective of this CSA is laying the foundation of an ever-increasing Nanotechnology-based synergy between Electromagnetics, Metamaterial, Electronics, and Photonics and to boost the future application-driven research through the establishment of an accepted language among physicists and engineers, a shared way of thinking, a common theoretical foundation and a common strategy for the future. A second objective is concerned to establish the boundary, the road map, the research agenda, and the dissemination plan of Nanoarchitectronics and its boundary with respect to existing and initiatives. A third objective is attracting new researchers, especially in early stage and/or from SME in this new research, by organizing a training program constituted by a cycle of courses on the main research areas of NTX. To achieve these objectives, Nanoarchitectronics is structured in four main activities. The “Concept” activity is devoted to establish and define the concepts of Nanoarchitectronics and its boundaries with respect to other disciplines and to the activity carried out by other consortia. The “Strategy” activity identifies the policy dialogue and the strategic view of the consortium in terms of position, impact and vision. The “Virtual Networking” serves to internal web communication (private), and for dissemination (public). The “Dissemination and Exploitation” activity, is mainly carried out through PhD short courses and scientific Workshops and special sessions.

Deliverables

This delivery will include the final report on Surfacetronix (SFX) PhD short course. This report will include:
1) program of the course
2) speakers and their affiliation
3) number of partecipants and their affiliation
4) logistic arrangement (venue, coffee breaks and social dinner)
5) course management (material provided to the students, experimental laboratories, exercises given to the students, final exams and relevant outcome, evaluation of the course from the students)
6) possible scholarships for course partecipation given to worthwhile students
7) budget and sponsorship

The delivery is a report that will describe the status of WP6, and in particular the technical documentation of the database starting from its alpha- and beta-releases, which will be initially shared only for testing purposes among the partners, and the actual deployment of the tool for use by the partners and through the platform developed in WP VN.2. The report will also include the advancement status of the VN.2 activity

This delivery will include the final report on Metatronix (MTX) short course. This report will include:
1) program of the course
2) speakers and their affiliation
3) number of partecipants and their affiliation
4) logistic arrangement (venue, coffee breaks and social dinner)
5) course management (material provided to the students, experimental laboratories, exercises given to the students, final exams and relevant outcome, evaluation of the course from the students)
6) possible scholarships for course partecipation given to worthwhile students
7) budget and sponsorship

The report will describe the synergic activity of the WP VN.2 devoted to maximize the efficiency in the dissemination process. The report will describe the open part which will contain the published research papers made available in Open Access mode to any visitor of the webpage, as well as the resources accessible only to the project partners (i.e., internal reports prepared for dissemination of best practises or unpublished results which may be of interest to the project partners but not yet ready for public dissemination). The latter will be actually linked from the database developed in WP VN.2 and described in D6.1.

This delivery will include the final report on EXEMI PhD short course. This report will include:
1) program of the course
2) speakers and their affiliation
3) number of partecipants and their affiliation
4) logistic arrangement (venue, coffee breaks and social dinner)
5) course management (material provided to the students, experimental laboratories, exercises given to the students, final exams and relevant outcome, evaluation of the course from the students)
6) possible scholarships for course partecipation given to worthwhile students
7) budget and sponsorship

The report will include: survey of the state of art methodologies for design and optimization of SFX; the definition of a general analytical and modelling framework to improve the potential of SFX; the definition of criteria aimed at integrating multi-resolution computational tools for multiphysics and multiscale problems; the definition of a new modular method in which the elementary building blocks are integrated and optimized to fit the operation requirements.

The report will present a summary of the following activities: consultation on scope, structure, concept and target of the position paper; dialogue with EC to spread the concept of Nanoarchitectronics and identify possible themes to be integrated in H2020 work-programme; modus operandi and implementation.

The report will describe the outcome of the Multiscale Design Enabling Modeling (MDM) and the Nanoscale Engineering Material (NAME) framework of MTX, in order to achieve desired performance with minimum costs, maximum scalability and optimal reconfigurability, as well as characterization of MTX components.

The deliverable is a report on insertion of quantum effects in EM systems, EM concepts and architectures brought at nanoscale levels, control/reconfigure NTX-based EM system by nanoscale light-matter interactions.

The report will concern the conceptual aspects of phase variable SFX, sensing/radiating SFX, cloaking SFX. Additionally, the results of the individuation of the EU competences within and outside the consortium will be presented.

This deliverable is a report on a survey of international consortia and research communities related to Nanoarchitectronics and a summary of identified/implemented coordination/cross-fertilization actions.

The deliverable is a report on the establishment of theoretical and computational methods, which unifies multilevel, quantum and EM methods, and system-by-design methods on one side, as well as the identification of materials and nanotechnologies-based integrated devices operating at microwaves and TeraHertz.

This is a document outlining how research data collected and/or generated within the Virtual Networking Activity will be handled during and at the end of the research project. It describes what data will be collected/generated, which methodology and standards will be followed, whether and how this data will be shared and/or made open and how it will be curated and preserved.